Archive for January, 2010

The remarkable and haunting, independent, 2009, science fiction short film, 2081: Everyone Will Finally Be Equal, is based on the Kurt Vonnegut short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” from his book, Welcome to the Monkey House, and is now available on DVD. Vonnegut’s powerful and incisive story critiques egalitarian statism in which “equality” is the only...Read More »

I’ve commented before on the explicitly liberal (in the contemporary sense of the word) turn that Newsweek magazine has recently taken. While I’ve always viewed the magazine as having a liberal bias, until recently it came across as liberal reporters attempting to present the facts. Now they’ve quit reporting the news (because it’s so...Read More »

Last night, I suffered through Obama’s speech. I noticed the overarching theme was: in 2010, the administration will finally getting around to all it promised for 2009, as well as a whole other year worth of miracles. He begins by taking credit for saving the economy from a second Great Depression. “[W]e acted, immediately...Read More »

In the fallout from Climategate, the Times of London reports that Great Britain’s chief scientific adviser John Beddington has now become highly critical of the dismissive and disreputable tactics and exaggerated claims of climate alarmists within the scientific community. Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made...Read More »

Charles Krauthammer reveals on the “O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News that President Barack Obama’s “spending freeze” is a complete fraud, in which Obama is not just excluding all major areas of federal government spending (i.e., discretionary, Social Security, military, stimulus, etc.), but is locking in the already gigantic increases in federal department spending levels...Read More »

Here is a splendid and insightful, new rap video pitting the ideas of Nobel Laureate, Austrian School economist Friedrich A. Hayek against those of Lord John Maynard Keynes. As Hayek has shown, economic crises of boom and bust are created by governments that expand credit through central banks, creating unsustainable bubbles that ultimately crash....Read More »

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, we are witnessing an outpouring of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Progressives emphatically deny that a corporation consists of nothing more than a voluntary aggregation of natural persons and that therefore it has all the rights of speech that...Read More »

Although I am reputed to be a cynic, a pessimist, and a bah-humbugger, I am not given to doomsaying in the same way that a growing number of others are. Although I tend to expect, as Thomas Jefferson did, that the natural progress of things will be for liberty to yield and government to...Read More »

From the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704509704575018990188917592.html In my Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader, there are many entries on immigration that make clear that this nation, particularly business, has benefitted from the low-to-high skilled labor of immigrants. Business knows this essential fact and supported open immigration policies since this nation began industrializing....Read More »

In a post a few months ago I lamented that state government officials, who have much to lose in the proposed federal healthcare reforms, have not spoken out much in opposition to the costs the reforms would foist on them. There have been a few cases, and here is another. Florida Attorney General Bill...Read More »

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